Fish flavours are used as food additives to alter or enhance the flavours of a natural food product such as fish and fish products, or to create fish flavour to foods which lack a natural fish flavour such as snacks.
The flavour of cooked fish meat and cooked meat of other aquatic animals is the result of a complex mixture of aldehydes and browning products. The aldehydes are formed through degradation of polyunsaturated fatty acids, for example docosahexaenoic acid (Shahidi, F. Flavor of Meat, Meat Products and Seafoods (2nd Edition). Springer-Verlag).
Commercial fish flavours are produced by processing whole fish, in particular so-called white fish. A disadvantage of this production process is that there is little or no possibility to tune the process conditions such that any specific fish flavour can be made. As a consequence, these types of fish flavours have a generic fish flavour and do not provide the customer the possibility to select any specific flavour.
Another possibility to bring fish flavour to food products is by adding so-called top notes. These are chemicals which naturally occur in fish but which, unlike the abovementioned fish flavours, are not derived from fish, but are produced synthetically. A disadvantage of top notes is that they only provide part of the fish flavour, namely the smell or scent, but not the taste, and therefore lack the full-bodied, characteristic fish flavour of the real fish or fish product. Another disadvantage is that they are not natural and are often avoided by the consumer for being artificial and not natural.
A disadvantage of many of the fish derived fish flavours is that these are not kosher and/or halal which severely limits their application in the food industry. It is an object of the present invention to obviate the disadvantages of the current fish flavours and to provide a novel process for the production of a range of different fish flavours.